It’s so much my favorite law blog (and I am so much of a law geek) that I freely admit that one of the highpoints of my blogging career was having a post of mine cited in In Custodia Legis — it was a link to a 2012 post about Henry Campbell Black, editor and compiler of Black’s Law Dictionary.1

And when you combine my favorite law dictionaries with my favorite law blog?

And that happened last week, when In Custodia Legis reported a development that we as genealogists should welcome with open arms: an initiative by the Georgetown University Law Library in Washington, D.C., to digitize its law dictionaries collection, adding a wide variety of new resources to our digital bookshelves when we need more help understanding just what some pesky legal record really means.

The author of the post, Anne Guha, a summer intern at the Law Library, wrote:

Recently, while conducting research in the course of my studies, I learned of a project currently underway at the Georgetown Law Library to digitize their collection of early legal dictionaries. This will facilitate the entry of these rare editions into the public domain and make them virtually accessible.

The project is on-going, but the collection titled Digital Dictionaries: 1481-1891, already offers digitized copies of almost 40 early dictionaries. … Georgetown Law Library currently plans to scan a total of 87 titles, comprising over 120 volumes. Chronologically, the completed collection will begin with Georgetown Law Library’s 1481 Jodocus Vocabularius–held to be the first printed legal dictionary–and will run through 1891, the year of the first edition of Black’s Law Dictionary. The collection will primarily include English language dictionaries, along with a few non-English European titles. Each dictionary will be divided into a set of color PDFs, which can be downloaded or accessed online in an embedded document viewer.3

Heading over to the Georgetown Law Library site, you can find the Digital Dictionaries: 1481-1916 collection at this link. The Library says — in fancy language — what I keep saying: when we’re stumped by what something means, it helps to have a dictionary that was in use as close to the time when the record was created as possible.

Here’s a small sampling of what the collection includes now — and check back periodically, because there are many more to come: